MCM PROJECT: 2013 in review

At the end of this post there is a link to go through to the annual report 2013 from WordPress for the Mexico City Metro Project. In the year I made a grand total of 1 post! Having completed the station visits in 2012 and being absent from Mexico City there wasn’t anything I really wanted to add.

Still, it was nice to keep receiving visits to the blog and even nicer to receive comments and e-mails from readers.

Line 12 has now been in full operational mode for quite a while so there is the need to update the blog with visits to the 16 new stations although you can read about the familiarisation ride I took here. Look out for some new posts in 2014!

I did, however, do quite a bit of blogging in 2013 at a new blog I set up which includes some stories, articles, photos and the like, mainly based on the three years I spent travelling and living in Latin America. The readership has been pretty limited so by all means, please click on through!

Back to the metro and undoubtedly the biggest news of the year was the ticket price increase at the end of 2013 from 3 pesos to 5 pesos. The 2 peso increase (approx. 15c US) doesn’t seem like much but when considered as a percentage increase (+66%) it’s a pretty big hike. For the affluent and most tourists it’s no big deal, for the middle classes it probably won’t hurt too much but for the hundreds of thousands or millions that survive on the minimum wage (65 pesos a day in Mexico City) or eke out an existence in the informal economy it’s a sharp and painful increase. Of course there was protest, resistance and disobedience. If you want to know more I recommend this LA Times article or else watch this short video below. Happy new year and thanks for reading.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 36,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.